The Ghosts of WordPress Past

For a long time, the Administration Panels, the interface or UI often misnamed the “dashboard”, stayed basically the same. Slowly, the WYSIWYG editor was developed for the Write Panel, named the Rich Text Editor, now Visual Editor, but the core panels stayed the same. With WordPress 2.5, the whole look changed but WordPress basically functioned the same, feeling more like a layer of paint had been applied rather than an overhaul of the functionality.

With WordPress 2.7, the whole interface changed. Jane Wells and the entire WordPress development team and WordPress Community worked together for a year to put the WordPress Administration Panels through a total overhaul based upon massive testing and feedback. No longer would the interface be guesswork and assumptions. Massive testing, surveys, and polls were done to get input from everyone on how things should work, and kudos to everyone involved. It’s an incredible work of art and compromise to get WordPress working more efficiently and beautifully on the administration backend.

In another walk through the past of WordPress, Peter Westwood brought back memories with “Useless graphs (What went before),” showing the WordPress release against repository revision number, time against repository revision number, and WordPress release filesize in kilobytes since the beginning.

All this talk about the history of WordPress has me thinking about my own history with WordPress. Do you have some history with WordPress worth sharing?

For us it was the fact that it could make history in the way we used it. April 30th 2005 was our first use of WordPress and post. Using it to Blog about school funding in New Hampshire, we published anything and everything on school funding.

We ended up in Supreme Court and won. Our attorney told us, in part because they were able to use the data to hold the politicians accountable for the things they had said.

Our community site was a outgrowth of how effective our efforts were in school funding, New Hampshire Communities for Adequate Funding of Education (NHcafe). http://www.NHcafe.com (or org)

The website was a hybrid, since WordPress was simple in those days. The “Blog” was contributed to every day for the years that the state fought us. Every item relating to school funding was published. Good for us or bad for us, it was the collaboration and the data base that gave us the power to win.

I am on the school board, in the right place and the right time. With thousands around the world contributing time and talent to WordPress so people like us can make a difference.

We set up a “vote” WordPress blog for my partner who is now on the Town Council, that “one story a day” became Londonderry Hometown Online News with 2000 articles, 3000 photos and even more comments, in under two years, but that is a story for another day.

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[…] defense of their case on school funding before the Supreme Court of New Hampshire and the Senate. According to Steve Young of Londonderry NY.net, when asked about sharing some WordPress history, he said: For us it was the […]